In today's manufacturing environment, monitoring a production process and collecting statistical information on the status of the production process is considered essential in achieving world class quality standards.
Usually, in order to register a defect occurring in a workpiece, an operator fills out a tally sheet where a brief written identification of each occurred defect should be included. At the end of a shift, a quality engineer enters data taken from all tally sheets into a computer system for computation and graphing in order to analyze the entered data and to undertake needed corrective actions.
Unfortunately, many manufacturing companies may find little benefit from data thus collected. Sometimes, the vague nature of the data collected does not provide causal clues, and the difficulty in collecting the data slows down the production process itself and leads to both errors in the data content and decreases productivity effectiveness.
Contemporary data collectors like, for example, Genesis models QA3000/QA8300, are intended, among many other functions, for structuring a data-base on the basis of user-defined identifiers of the defect occurred, such as model, serial number, location of the defect, severity, disposition and so on. The Genesis collectors accept inspection input from keyboard, bar code wand, cases scanner, CCD wand and/or voice recognition circuits. However, these collectors are expensive, and sometimes provide much more functions than the manufacturing company either expects or wants.
Therefore, it would be highly desirable to devise an easy-to-use and inexpensive system for data entry and analysis which would provide in-depth readily-useable information on the status of the production process without slowing the production process itself.